FREDERICKSBURG, Virginia This month the UN Commission on Human Rights issued its latest, now annual, condemnation of ongoing rights violations in Myanmar, highlighting in particular the continued detention of Aung San Suu Kyi, general secretary of the National League for Democracy, and her deputy, Tin Oo, who have been held under house arrest since they were attacked in May 2003.
 
I was able to meet with Suu Kyi at her home in Yangon, the capital, just three months before that attack, while she was traveling in the north of Myanmar to promote democracy.
 
During that visit, she said that although the authorities had tried to destroy the NLD after prohibiting its candidates, and those of other prodemocratic parties, from convening a Parliament after their decisive electoral victory in 1990, a combination of internal and external pressures had allowed the parties to survive.
 
She said that the NLD was continuing to ask for international sanctions to isolate the military regime and help force peaceful change in the country.
 
Now the people of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, are again asking the international community to stand with them as they engage in the largest civil disobedience action the country has ever seen. The NLD, which has never legally been banned in Myanmar, initiated a public petition late last year calling on the authorities to release Suu Kyi.
 
A member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines visiting Myanmar recently was told that by late February, almost a half a million people had added their names to that call.
 
The simple act of signing a petition is illegal under the military junta's draconian laws, and people who have previously circulated petitions requesting political change or challenging decisions of the junta now languish in jail. When the ICBL representative asked if people were afraid to sign the petition, members of the NLD's Central Committee responded, "Yes, they are afraid. But they sign."
 
The petition campaign continues to grow, virtually ignored or unknown outside Myanmar. Just as the 1990 election showed massive popular support for democratic governance, this petition shows popular condemnation of the seizure and detention of Myanmar's Nobel Peace laureate.
 
For every person who risks signing the petition, there are many more who are sympathetic but afraid to take action. Yet many Burmese people continue to be willing to take significant risks to try to bring about peaceful change. It is now time for external pressure to be stepped up and consistently applied.
 
Some argue that sanctions against the military junta should be dropped and replaced by "constructive engagement" with the regime. This is despite the call of the NLD itself for sanctions, and the clear example of the international isolation and economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa that helped internal forces bring democracy to that nation.
 
For nonviolent sanctions to work, there must be a global consensus, not just the current series of disconnected and uncoordinated national policies. Myanmar has never lost the support of key states, which help supply it with arms, for example, such as Singapore and Pakistan - neither a beacon of democracy.
 
The military junta must not be allowed to continue to hold democracy hostage in Myanmar. External pressure must be applied in support of activists if we want nonviolent political change.
 
The international community must unite in applying effective pressure on the Burmese dictatorship - politically and economically - until it cedes power to those who earned it legitimately at the ballot box.
 
(Jody Williams is founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.)